‘I wanted to scare them, but I knew that my pretend pigeons couldn’t help.’
A strange phone call brings a police inspector to a remote hotel in the mountains. Everything seems quiet enough at first, but it’s not long before a series of inexplicable events culminate in an apparent murder…
Russian authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky adapt their own classic novel for director Grigori Kromanov. This slice of Soviet Bloc science fiction comes from Estonia and has Uldis Pucitis leading an ensemble cast.
Inspector Peter Glebsky (Pucitis) is sent to an isolated lodge hotel in the mountains to investigate a mysterious phone message. On arrival, he’s greeted by the owner, Alex Snewahr (Jüri Järvet), who introduces him to the various guests. Simon Simonet (Lembit Peterson) is a young physicist on holiday, Mr and Mrs Moses (Karlis Sebris and Irena Kriauzaite) are just passing through, and the sickly Hinckus (Mikk Mikiver) is there for the mountain air. He’s accompanied by associate Olaf Andvarafors (Tiit Härm), who has taken a shine to the innkeeper’s distant relative, Bruhn (Nijole Ozelyte). Pucitis discovers that an anonymous note has been slipped into his pocket identifying Mikiver as a notorious gangster known as ‘The Owl’ and accuses him of planning a murder. Staff and guests assemble to drink and dance the night away in the dining room, but Mikiver suddenly goes missing.
During the night, an avalanche cuts the hotel off from the rest of the world, and strange things start happening. Pucitis finds Mikiver tied up by an unknown assailant before a panicked Peterson reports that he has found Kriauzaite dead in her room. When Pucitis goes to investigate, however, he finds her very much alive and seemingly confused by Peterson’s story. Then Härm is found dead in his room after saying goodnight to Ozelyte. A stranger (Sulev Luik) is discovered outside the hotel in the snow, half frozen to death, and, when questioned, provides only the vaguest of answers. He gives his name as Luarvik Luarvik and begins to behave very oddly indeed.
After becoming increasingly unpopular with the authorities during the 1960s, novelists Arkady and Boris Strugatsky had been eased out of the Soviet mainstream publishing world to such an extent that their work only appeared in magazines. Their 1970 novel ‘The Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel’ was an attempted comeback of sorts, being a parody/homage to detective stories with a science-fiction twist. It contained no overt social commentary likely to upset the authorities. However, it’s not very hard to spot the political critique in the film version, although Kromanov is careful not to let the message overwhelm the drama. Perhaps, by the end of the 1970s, the shackles on artistic expression in the Soviet Bloc were beginning to loosen, or maybe it was simply that censorship of films was no longer a priority.
Given that the screenwriters are adapting their own source material, it’s hardly surprising that the results run close to the novel. Almost inevitably, they have simplified matters somewhat, principally by thinning out the cast of characters a little. Magician Du Barnstoker is nowhere to be seen, and his intriguing niece Bruhn has been relegated to a largely redundant role as an unspecified relative of the innkeeper. The real issue here, however, is with the pacing, the weird events of the night in question tumbling over each other so rapidly that the audience may be a little bemused, especially if they are unfamiliar with the novel. Kromanov also leans into the Film Noir visuals a little too heavily. It’s an understandable stylistic choice with this material, but requiring the audience to peer through murk and gloom when trying to follow a tricky plot is probably not the best way to keep them engaged.
The good news is that all the various bizarre story threads and events are gathered satisfactorily at the climax. Sadly, there’s been little effort to build an emotional connection with any of the characters, so the tragic outcome has little resonance. That’s quite a shame because Pucitis was born to play a world-weary, hard-bitten detective straight out of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett, and his central performance is the film’s ace in the hole. It also showcases the writer’s political agenda. Pucitis confirms on several occasions that he’s a cop who just follows orders. He’s a conformist, guided almost solely by the law and its precepts. When faced with a life-or-death decision, he cannot step outside the rules and connect with his humanity. The film even finishes with him speaking straight to the camera, defending his choice, albeit with a noticeable lack of conviction. Clearly, he’s intended to symbolise the State with all its inflexible machinery and blind, merciless authority. This conceit is present in the original novel but only inferred rather than screamed from the rooftops.
Kromanov’s film lasts 84 minutes, but it’s possible that a longer running time was originally intended. In the book, Inspector Glebsky comes to the hotel to investigate the accident of the ‘dead mountaineer’ the previous summer that has given the inn its new name. This element does play into the overall mystery. This is replaced in the film by an offscreen ‘mysterious phone call’, the contents of which are never explained and the author of which is never identified. There is a brief scene where Pucitis seems to dream about the fall of the ‘dead mountaineer’, but it’s never referenced again. The slightly jumbled nature of the events of the second act also suggests that there may have been some significant trimming in post-production. Sadly, no one has attempted to address these issues with a remake, although a point-and-click adventure game based on the novel was created in 2009 by the Russian software house Akella. An English language version was released in the West two years later.
Arkady Strugatsky was born in 1925 in Georgia, which had recently been ceded to the Bolsheviks to form part of the emerging Soviet Union. The family moved to Leningrad, where Boris arrived eight years later. The brothers’ father, an art critic, died during the evacuation of the city in 1942. Arkady was drafted into the army a year later, where he worked as a foreign language interpreter until 1955. By then, Boris had graduated from university and working as an astronomer. They began writing science fiction together in 1958 and achieved almost immediate success with ‘The Land of Crimson Clouds’, which was published in 1959. It was their first novel set in the ‘Noon Universe’, which formed the backdrop for much of their work. They produced their most celebrated novel, ‘Roadside Picnic’ in 1972, which formed the basis for Andrei Tarkovsky’s highly regarded epic ‘Stalker’ (1979). They continued writing together until Arkady died in 1991. Boris published two solo novels afterwards, using a pseudonym, and passed away over two decades later.
It’s certainly worth checking out, but there’s a real sense of a missed opportunity.